The impact of education on modern family-union initiation

Abstract

The impact of education on formation of first unions is analyzed using interview data from a sample of Swedish women born in 1936–1960. A distinction is made between achieved level of education and the effect of being a student. The former appears to have little effect, but students start consensual unions at lower rates than corresponding non-students, and they also marry at much lower rates. Social background has not been important for marriage formation, but it has been for cohabitation, which was pioneered by the working class. There is no evidence that modern cohabitation started as a campus movement.

Keywords

Acknowledgements: This report is part of the documentation of an on-going research project in the University of Stockholm, Section of Demography, called ‘Life cycle phases of Swedish women: A study of education, labour-force participation and childbearing among Swedish women born in 1936–1960’. It is financed mainly by the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Programming assistance by Jozef Saers was paid for by support from Grant No. HD19226 from the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Statistics Sweden has kindly granted us access to anonymized data from the Swedish Fertility Survey of 1981. The author is grateful to Britta Hoem for many discussions about the subject matter of this paper, and for additional computing assistance. Discussions with people mentioned in footnote 7 have been helpful, and so have impulses from Eva Bernhardt, Robert Erikson, Cecilia Etzler, Øystein Kravdal, Göran Lindberg, Susan Olzak, Joseph Schwartz, and colleagues at seminars in the Universities of Chicago and Stockholm and in the US NIMH/NIA Network on Longitudinal Research Methods. As usual, Hilary Page has given sound editorial advice.

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